School Lunch: Eaten with a Morton’s Fork?
By Lisa Jancarik
I have a big parenting decision to make: should I pack a lunchbox for my kiddo next fall or enroll her in the school lunch program? I had first started to think about it when Jamie Oliver made his quixotic stab at improving the menu for the lunch program in Huntington, WV schools for his TV series Food Revolution. Oliver was doomed: the red tape involved in developing a school lunch menu is enormous, juggling suppliers like the USDA and local producers to plan meals meeting criteria for protein, calorie count, saturated fat and other guidelines…all for an average of $1 per meal. When he did get his chance to feed the kids a healthy, fresh lunch of his own devising, he didn’t prepare pizza or chicken nuggets with a predictable degree of popularity. Oliver’s hard go of it in Huntington put the spotlight on the knotty problem of feeding kids well, especially on a large scale.
Last month, one study of American children revealed that school lunches may have a significant role to play in the epidemic obesity of our kids. Renewed attention to this matter comes in the wake of First Lady Michele Obama’s championing of the Let’s Move! program targeted at childhood obesity.
The Hot Lunch Option
This afternoon I spoke with Jennifer Reiser, RD, LDN, Assistant Foodservice Director/Nutrition Educator for Metz & Associates, which contracts with the North Allegheny School District. The school lunch menu Reiser, a registered dietitian, created for February had been posted online and took multiple pages to print out. The first page was the familiar calendar with menu selections for each of five days with a little clip art to jazz it up, just like the ones my elementary school used thirty years ago. But that was where the similarity ended: two pages following that calendar listed nutrient analysis for the foods offered this academic year: calorie count, saturated fat, protein, carbs and fiber. Parents didn’t get that info a generation ago.
For the curious, the highest calorie item listed was General Tso’s Chicken, which I doubt any of my classmates would have touched with a stick back when I was in school. Perhaps kids are a wee bit more cosmopolitan than we were back then (wouldn’t take much, given where and when I grew up). If the hot lunch offerings aren’t of interest to a kid, however, fresh fruits and veggies are available daily, another change for the better since I was handing over my red ticket each day for gray French-cut beans or peas. Back then, one could choose one’s flavor of milk, and that was about it.
I asked Reiser about the NA Cafeteria Fund, which she described as an online account parents set up to pay for school lunch items. Interestingly, parents can then access this account to see what their kids are eating (or, at least, buying) from the school cafeteria. When a kid accesses her account to pay for lunch using her personal numeric code, the cafeteria worker sees a photo of the child, any allergy information, plus parental restrictions about what she may or may not buy (e.g., snack only on Fridays). Not only does the account system allow more monitoring by parents, but it also speeds up the lunch line a bit compared to lines of little kids struggling to make change. Control freak that I am, this system has some real appeal for me. She also can’t lose her lunch money or forget her lunch on the bus.
Still, even the most nutritious lunch in the world has to be eaten for a child to derive benefit from it, and my kid won’t eat 60% of what shows up on the tray. She’s a pretty adventurous eater for a five-year-old, but there are limits to her willingness to try things (meat with no breading isn’t going to happen, for example). Plus, the culture among kids is and always has been that you aren’t supposed to like school lunches. My daughter, with her strong need for acceptance in a new school, will almost certainly embrace mores of kid culture and simply throw out most of any hot lunch that doesn’t include a entrees approved by her peers.
The Packing Option
If I pack a lunch for her, then I can work around her individual tastes. Plus, if I pack stuff that is different from the hot lunch menu, then she won’t be socially programmed to march her whole meal to the trash like a dyspeptic little lemming. For example, I can give my kid foods she loves enough to eat even in front of other kids who won’t touch them. The other argument one often hears in favor of packing lunches is that it’s less expensive than buying the school lunch. Now, considering I just paid $3 for the red bell pepper I plan to feed her this week, this assertion may not turn out to be true for our family.
My worst fear in packing, however, is that my kid will look at the kid with a packed lunch of Swedish fish and Kool-Aid on her left and the other with Lunchables on her right, and then reject her own relatively unglamorous sandwich on multigrain bread and seedless grapes. Junk food makes up nearly half of the calories most kids consume these days, so you know it isn’t all coming from the school lunches—her peers will be bringing it from home, too. I hear from my friends employed in various school districts that trading in the lunchroom is not allowed (in this age of allergy concerns), but that doesn’t prevent it at the bus stop. Should I make a hobby of menu planning, and arrange fanciful bento box offerings for her each day, like Melissa, who writes www.anotherlunch.com? We all know kids are very visual eaters, but…wow. Plus, there is the new problem of creating the lunch that is “too pretty to eat.” Yep, my fear of creating a lunch that is “too pretty to eat” is going to be my reason for not creating a bunny out of cheese sandwich, not a lack of dedication.
I’m still pretty conflicted about the whole thing, but I plan to try packing her lunch for a few weeks. By then, she’ll have an opinion about the food at school, and I’ll know if I can stick to it for the long term.
Thanks to Jennifer Reiser, RD, LDN, Assistant Foodservice Director/Nutrition Educator for Metz & Associates.
Resources and More Reading
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/health/research/08childhood.html?_r=1&hpw
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/Recipes/junk-food-makes-half-kids-calories/story?id=11767886
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